Transcript

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>> Dozens of officials representing US allies in it's battle to take down Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, converging on Washington Wednesday, to talk about how the fight's going. But Warren Strobel says this meeting is more than a progress report.>> One of the main things that'll be on the table in the private meetings is, when and how to try to recapture the city of Mosul in Iraq from Islamic State.

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It's a place where Islamic State first declared a caliphate in 2014, it's the largest city in Iraq that Islamic State still controls. And it's an incredibly large and complex city with many different ethnic minorities, Sunni, Shia, Kurds, Turkmens, and others.>> Taking back Mosul has been high on the US led coalition's wish list for over a year.

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>> What is happening now, is that the Iraqi military forces, last month, took back another major city, Fallujah, near Baghdad. And they've been moving rather quickly up the Tigris River Valley towards Mosul. So it does seem that the attack on Mosul now is just a matter of time and there's some debate about how soon it should begin.

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Everybody wants to do it as quickly as possible, but there's concern that if it's not adequately prepared, you could have A, a major bloodbath in this highly populated urban area and secondly, what happens the day after.>> As many as 2.4 million refugees in Mosul will need food, water, sanitation and health care once Islamic State gets booted out.

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And President Obama will want to be sure to avoid the kind of political vacuum that allowed ISIS to take power in the first place, with an eye to his own legacy and beyond.>> There’s a lot of speculation that President Obama would like before he leaves office in January, 2017, to have eradicated Islamic State, if not from Syria, at least from Iraq and to have a major victory under his belt that would help him but also help Hillary Clinton in her campaign.